When I began teaching almost 20 years ago, I didn't know much, but two things were clear: I loved reading, and my principal was adamant that all learners need stories that are rich, beautiful, and complex.
The first summer of my career, I observed my new principal leading a 5th grade summer school class of below-grade-level readers. It was probably 95 degrees in the Harlem classroom. Yet every one of those 10-year-old striving readers was riveted by the book in hand, Maniac Magee, by Jerry Spinelli.
"They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump," my principal read aloud. After he modeled reading the chapter, he returned to its first sentence and asked, "Who are they?" Conversation and questions flew. Students were hooked on a grade-level novel.
Afterward, I asked him, "How do you do that?" His answer: "By believing in all of our kids, assigning grade-level texts, and providing the support they need to access those texts, we can go a long way toward closing achievement gaps, improving reading, and building knowledge."
All children should have access to complex, grade-level texts, but unfortunately that's not the reality across the country. Too often, students are assigned mostly books that are below grade level—sometimes, far below. The content often bores students and embarrasses them in front of higher-achieving peers. In a survey of thousands of teachers, the RAND Corporation found that "elementary ELA teachers reported spending the majority of in- and out-of-class reading time on leveled texts" rather than grade-level reading (p. 33). In other words, students spend most of their time reading books that line up with their tested ability level, even if that is far below grade level.
This focus on leveled reading is often driven by teachers' desire to set students up for success: we don't want a child to turn away from reading out of frustration. My principal (and mentor), however, taught my colleagues and me that giving all students grade-level (and sometimes, even above grade-level) reading built knowledge and motivated readers with interesting, relevant content. From him I learned to hold students to high expectations, while providing plenty of support.
In our school, we used several approaches to provide that support:
- Multiple reads: Students listened to the content read aloud and read it independently, multiple times.
- Close reading: Students carefully read "chunks," or small sections of text, to explore unique features and answer compelling questions.
- Text sets: Teachers paired related articles, poems, song lyrics, and images of varying complexity with a challenging anchor text to build students' knowledge of topics.
- Fluency: Students focused daily on fluency by reading short grade-level passages, practicing accuracy, prosody, and pacing until achieving mastery.
- Vocabulary: We worked tirelessly and constantly on vocabulary acquisition. We lived for our study of words!
Armed with these strategies, my 3rd grade class of striving readers, special needs students, English language learners, and grade-level readers traveled down the rabbit hole with Alice in Wonderland. We linked everything we did that first quarter—from math to social studies—to our study of Lewis Carroll's 1865 story. It turns out that, although the interest level of this masterpiece is appropriate for 3rd graders, the Lexile level (980L) is in the middle school range!
Not yet aware of Lexile levels, and surviving, as many first-year teachers do, on a blend of inspiration and fear, I did not alter the text. The copy of the book I read aloud was mine from childhood. It was worn and the pages were torn. Opening it in front of those young minds felt magical.
And so we began together with the first passage in the book, copied in my best teacher writing on chart paper, for students, of all levels, to see:
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
We read and reread the story, examining its language and illustrations. Students listened to it read aloud by me, by peer partners, and by audiobook narrators. We practiced fluency with paragraphs from Alice in Wonderland, and paired the novel with accessible texts. We had lots of conversations. We studied vocabulary words and their multiple meanings (for example, "banks"). We asked ourselves Alice's essential question all quarter, "What is the use of a book?"
Almost 20 years after that first Alice in Wonderland experiment, I now work with a team of talented teacher-writers to create curricula based on these same principles and strategies. We focus on building deep knowledge and empowering students to articulate knowledge. We work in classrooms with a range of students—some who read below grade level and some who read above—but we believe that all of them can engage deeply with grade-level text. Our team aims to open doors for all readers to think about complex ideas and language.
Recently, during a meeting of this curriculum team, I was distracted by a message on my phone—a post by one of my students from that Alice in Wonderland classroom. He came to that 3rd grade class from a refugee camp, with little English and more burdens than an 8-year-old child should bear. His update announced that he was just accepted into law school at a prestigious institution. "At one time," he reflected, "I wouldn't have even applied to this kind of school. Now, I realize, it could be a safety school."
I commented, "I always knew you could do it. And all that close reading we did is going to serve you well in law school!"
Productive struggle is not easy, but it is vital to student learning. Invite students to their own Wonderland of reading. Help students become "curiouser and curiouser" by putting complex reading in the hands of every student, every day.
